X owner Elon Musk vowed to take legal action against Apple over alleged antitrust violations, as he accused the iPhone maker of making it impossible for any AI companies bar OpenAI to hit the number one spot on its App Store rankings.

In a series of posts on X yesterday (11 August) and continuing into today (12 August), Musk attacked Apple for seemingly giving preferential treatment to OpenAI on the App Store, which he called “an unequivocal antitrust violation”.

He said xAI, which developed the Grok AI chatbot and also owns X, would launch immediate legal proceedings.

Musk took particular issue with a belief Apple “refused” to put X or Grok in its “Must Have” sections on the App Store, despite the social media platform being the number one news app and the AI chatbot ranking in fifth place among all apps.

In one post, Musk questioned if Apple is “playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know”.

The outspoken entrepreneur further questioned why Grok, which he claimed is the “smartest AI in the world”, is not mentioned at all under Apple’s AI section while OpenAI’s ChatGPT appeared prominently on most lists.

“Apple behaves like its owned by OpenAI, why?”

Apple and OpenAI struck an agreement in June 2024 for the vendor’s devices to include support for ChatGPT through Siri and other first party apps.

In response to Musk’s allegations, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hit back: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies.”

The two technology moguls have a long-running feud which has intensified in recent times.